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Defining conservatism down

I want you all to read this from self-styled “conservative” Bret Stephens. Just so we can get our bearings when it comes to the political spectrum. Because as I’ve been saying, with each losing “compassionate conservative” / moderate election cycle — wherein our centrist technocrat, pushed as the only “electable” or “serious” candidate by the RNC establishment, gets painted as an extremist right winger — the ranks of those who get to call themselves “conservative” merely because they meet the standards for centrism the left has tethered to technocratic mush grows, and it is these people who then presume to lecture “other conservatives” from their now actualized stance as a contemporary conservative opinion leader.

— Even though 30 years ago we’d have called them not “conservative, ” but rather “Democrats.”

Beyond that, I won’t go too deeply into addressing Stephens’ points, because they are part and parcel of a clarion call for how liberating it can feel — and how lessened the burden is on you to defend them — when you simply surrender your principles, acceding to the left’s ability to control the narrative and to effectively shame you into accepting the contours of their ideological worldview.

It is a call for comfortable assimilation into the leftist paradigm, a call for embracing your subjecthood and then living as existentialist heroes — knowing the war is lost, but trying for small victories from time to time to sustain a sense of purpose.

As far as particulars go, Stephens’ piece is an Iowa cornfield of rhetorical fail, stuffed with straw men that are then sneered away by a twister of converging hot air. From his ridiculous assertion that conservatives (and what he means here are social conservatives) are “obsessed with what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms” and a revulsion toward gays to his off-handed romanticism about the beauty of the Spanish language and the casual indictment he proffers about his fellow conservatives’ hatred for Latinos, who, as the canard he repeats goes, are absolutely and almost inherently, by way of culture, steeped in American values — “religiosity, hard work, personal stoicism and the sense of family obligation expressed through billions of dollars in remittances,” as Stephens would have it — even though there is really nothing intrinsically American about being, as an identity group, one of the biggest consumers of government services and welfare, Stephens offers up the traditional RINO litany of complaints about how it is that conservatism is what’s at fault for the failure to elect RINO Republicans. The difference being that today we’ve moved the entire political spectrum so far left that he and, say, Bill Kristol, pretend they are offering critiques of conservatives as conservatives themselves.

But the answers are still the same: embrace the amnesty movement that will provide countless new generations of reliably welfare-state voters, because that’s how we can prove that we like Latino’s, too (even though Reagan, having provided amnesty, never won the Latino vote, nor did Bush or McCain, who were both advocates of amnesty); keep your mouths shut about abortion, because even if you truly believe it to be the murder of a child, not everyone agrees with you, and who wants to have their noses rubbed in the fact that they may be advocating for murder-on-demand?; don’t defend the institution of marriage from any kind of traditionalist standpoint, because to do so would mark you as conservative, and conservatives need to learn to be conservative unconservatively; don’t run wacky candidates like, say, Michele Bachmann, because, you know, cuckoo!; and always accede to whatever the prevailing leftist narrative is on science, otherwise it is quite obvious that you are invincibly stupid and can’t be elected, and besides, you’re making Bret Stephens look bad for having to associate with you. Which, while it’s his job, doesn’t mean it has to be so unpleasant.

Happily, I think Stephens will get his wish, and this is the tack and tone the GOP will take toward conservatives going forward — though as I say, they’ll pretend the advice is coming from conservatives. Stephens, like Mitch Daniels, wants a “truce” on the “social issues,” as if these social issues don’t themselves have implications in the area of law or the economy (an easy example is that “comprehensive immigration reform” would create a dependency magnet, and the fact that Stephens admires the beauty in Borges’ writing isn’t going to help already overburdened local service providers from going bankrupt). Bill Kristol can’t really see the harm in raising taxes on millionaires — even though that position effectively embraces the already Marxist notion of progressive taxation, as well as leads to a usurpation of liberty, one in which it is declared that the government is in a better position to know how to spend the fruits of your labor than are you.

And these people wish to call themselves conservatives — and lecture us on conservatism as if we really are nothing more than the simple-minded racist bitterclingers the left has cast us as?

Fine. They can have that label, too. I’ll just go with constitutionalist / classical liberal. Social conservatives, who argue for policy from positions of personal morality without imposing them on us, instead allowing the electoral and representative system to play out — these people are also welcomed. And the GOP can go get stuffed.

Which is why I noted that I’m happy they’re taking this tack at this time. Because that means they’re over. Unless they can start bringing in Democrats with all their pandering. And even then, all that secures is a one party system of Statists and their bureaucratic armies.

Comments (90)

Why is it that when a Dem loses they claim it was poor messaging, but when a Republican loses they claim was because of their policies and values? Can’t recall hearing Democrats ever say, after losing, that they should become less radical. Nope, they just make sure that their message is less radical.

“religiosity, hard work, personal stoicism and the sense of family obligation expressed through billions of dollars in remittances,
[…]
It’s a fine European language with an outstanding literary tradition—Cervantes, Borges, Paz, Vargas Llosa

Uh, I wouldn’t want to be associated with a party that includes crazy Jessie Jackson Jr., shameless liars Wasserman-Schultz & Pelosi, murderer Ted Kennedy, KKK Kleagle Robert Byrd, sexual harasser Bill Clinton, etc.
The Democrats have the benefit of the media covering for all of its embarrassing members.

What’s wrong with Taxing Big Blue, as John Hayward at Human Events puts it? Eight of the ten wealthiest counties in the country went for Obama. I say give the American people what they voted for, like Menken said, good and hard.

Frankly, I’d really like to see us call their bluff. Introduce a tax on assets. Let the limousine leftists who run the Democratic party tell us what’s wrong with taking their own wealth.

No amount of messaging will get through to the American public at this point. The dumbed down and politicized schools have produced two generations of useful idiots. Sadly for the rest of us the only way we can prove to the American public that Democratic policies lead to ruin, is to let the Democrats ruin the country.

The Republican leadership loses continually in Washington because politics is one big game of Chicken. The guy who loses in a game of chicken is the guy who thinks he has something to lose more important than the game. I say let the Dems drive the bus off of the cliff. Vote present, tell the voters that the people have spoken and that the people who vote for Democrats and the Democrats they voted for own whatever disasters that will afflict us.

Hispanics send money home (HOME) because they expect to go back there and live off what they’ve helped build while living here.

If they have children or get welfare then that means any money they earn on the side goes HOME.

I’ve dealt with hispanics for a long time. Working alongside of them and supervising them. They most all have a common goal; TO GO BACK WHERE THEY WERE BORN once they can. Most all have FAMILY AT HOME and some have property AT HOME.

They consider the US as a place to come to get money TO SEND HOME.

I hope I have made myself clear.

Nothing wrong with that per se but it’s a far cry from the attitude of previous waves of immigrants and it’s not something one can build on. We definitely can’t instill any common pride in most of them as they don’t consider themselves part of this country.

Best way I can frame this; it’s like if you went to college out of state and while there you worked and lived but you really didn’t consider yourself a (insert state here)an. You still considered yourself a citizen of your HOME state. And you expected you would not be staying in that state. (yeah some do but you get the point)

There’s also LANGUAGE. Hispanics take pride in their language (why I don’t know, it’s just mongrelized Latin absorbed by the native aborigines subsumed by the Spanish Conquistadores or vice versa.)

Many take pride in not using English if they can get away with it. (que? meaning what, doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t understand. They don’t want to answer and it’s an easy way out. How can you prove they don’t know what you’re saying?)

In many ways, most are not very forthright nor will they stand up for things that whites will. they will stand up for family but country? Not so much. Especially the US.

Lotsa pride in where they come from.

They’ve gotten a reputation for industriousness but it’s a passive form and without supervision will not take initiative.

If only people lived it up[ward] rather than defining life down, wot? Unhappily, living it up has taken on a democratic meaning writ round with dissipation, rather than of seeking excellence. But such is the world of the democrat, anti-hierarchically speaking, and there seems nothing to do about it.

It dodged a bullet because a Romney victory would have obscured deeper trends in American politics the GOP must take into account. A Romney administration would also have been politically cautious and ideologically defensive in a way that rarely serves the party well.

This seems to reflect – correctly, I might add – some of Jeff’s concerns over a Romney candidacy. Nearly every turd has a peanut, after all.

Something big will happen in the next 4 years and if we’re fortunate the hangover will be worth it. But I don’t take anything for granted anymore.

I love this gem. Bilingualism is commendable for a person, much less so for a nation.

And aren’t Canada and Belgium and the Netherlands and Spain having fun with their lingustic minorities?

They consider the U.S. as a place to come to get money TO SEND HOME.

THIS.

There are some who come here to integrate, but most see the U.S. as a work site, not as their new home.

Hispanics take pride in their language (why I don’t know, it’s just mongrelized Latin…

An English speaker calling another language mongrelized? That’s a good one.

Many take pride in not using English if they can get away with it.

There is utility in playing dumb, she said from experience. There’s also the fact that speaking a foreign language is tiring even when you’re fairly good at it.

Also, English pronunciation is extremely hard for Spanish-speakers. We have way more vowels and some really tricky consonant combinations that they literally cannot get their mouths around. Speakers of Germanic languages such as Norwegian have much less trouble with English. (You ask me, Norwegian sounds like English run backwards.)

Not to mention that there are enough Spanish speakers around them that they can go for days or weeks at a time without needing to speak English.

They’ve gotten a reputation for industriousness

Born from the necessity of being in the lower classes, not from a Protestant work ethic. They all dream of being wealthy enough that they don’t have to work. Half of their Telenovelas are Cinderella stories, wherein a lovely young girl from a poor family attracts the attention of a wealthy man who finally takes her to his mansion and they live happily ever after.

The concept of career satisfaction or of finding fulfilment in work just doesn’t exist. They’re more like idle Europeans than us.

Hence the economic disparity between the U.S. and Canada on the one hand and Latin America on the other.

Let the states go broke. But this taxation scheme is nothing but a power grab meant to lend even more credibility to the notion of progressive punitive taxation.

Even if that fucks over Big Blue more somehow in the short term. In the end, what it really does is create a permanent class system, with the wealth on one end and the dependent on the other. The middle class dies.

Taking a temporary financial hit so that you can finally have a society where the riffraff is separated from the aristocrats is really a small price to pay to those wealthy Democrats who voted for Obama. Plus, they’ll be rewarded with crony deals that will allow them to make up in volume what they lose in percentage.

Having acquired 2.5 degrees in Spanish Lit, I can say that except for a few gems, the Spanish language has grossly underperformed in comparison to English, French, and German.

Spanish has no Dickens, no Shakespeare, no Twain. Cervantes cranked out Don Quijote contemporaneously with Shakespeare, but that was it. Lope de Vega and Calderón were great playwrights around that same time, but they don’t come close to Shakespeare’s quality. No one does. Not even Góngora’s sonnets hold a candle to Shakespeare’s.

The Romantic and Enlightenment movements passed by Spain almost entirely. The endless striving for perfection of the Romantics—symbolized by the infinite sea—looked like endless, Sisyphean despair to the Spaniards. Enlightenment? That’s for apostates and other Protestants.

Stephens is a moron who can’t distinguish between analytical thought and posturing. Would that he were in the minority.

dicentra the bulwark values are the ones the 700 clubbers have made take the back seat to their obsession with other people’s fetuses and their compulsive need to otherize gay people and their hyperdramatic angst about illegal immigrants

“….their obsession with other people’s [salt/fat/soda/meat consumption, exercise habits, choice in SUV/lightbulb/showerhead/toilet] and their compulsive need to otherize [Catholics, Evangelicals, Mormons, Isreal-supporting Jews, the rich, whites, stay at home moms] and their hyperdramatic angst about [“fairness”].
FIFY

the bulwark values are the ones the 700 clubbers have made take the back seat to their obsession with other people’s fetuses and their compulsive need to otherize gay people and their hyperdramatic angst about illegal immigrants

There is no ‘live and let live’ guiding the vote of the independent crowd. It’s about free shit and feeling better than people you hate because if you don’t make a show of hating them you might look kind of uncool. It’s empty vanity.

They don”t want to live on their own and they don’t want to let other people live on their own either. Which is why they vote for a bigger less accountable government and then come up with lame excuses about needing to do it because Pat Robertson isn’t cool.

American continent Spanish (until the technological boom of the late 20th century) consists mostly of Latin and few borrowed words (except now of English) more of a Latin spoken with a regional accent (slurred words, words chopped off or added, depending on the native tongue local to the area) and turns of phrase that are local.

English’s strength is it’s mongrelization and adaption of other languages into itself.

According to multiple intelligence sources who have served in Benghazi, there were more than just Libyan militia members who were held and interrogated by CIA contractors at the CIA annex in the days prior to the attack. Other prisoners from additional countries in Africa and the Middle East were brought to this location.

The Libya annex was the largest CIA station in North Africa, and two weeks prior to the attack, the CIA was preparing to shut it down. Most prisoners, according to British and American intelligence sources, had been moved two weeks earlier.

No, what I’m saying is that after two generations of a public indoctrinated by leftist schools, media and entertainment, the only way we can defend capitalism is by playing rope a dope. The only way we can demonstrate that leftist Democratic policies will lead to failure is to let them fail. Of course, it’s taken the people of Detroit a while to learn that lesson.

The permanent class/caste system is already in place. Rich liberals insulated from the gritty side of reality, poor and working poor mollified by handouts and an unaccountable class of public employees raking it in.

I really don’t know what the solution is. Half of Americans who care to vote want the Dems and there are 70 million Americans willing to do nothing to stand in the Dems’ way by taking the time to vote. Why not let them learn, good and hard, as Mencken put it, of the consequences of their actions.

Can the Democrats really destroy the country in the next four years?

Like I said, this is a game of chicken and the Democrats think we care more about defending capitalism than we do about winning.

American continent Spanish (until the technological boom of the late 20th century) consists mostly of Latin and few borrowed words (except now of English) more of a Latin spoken with a regional accent…

All of the Romance languages are bastardized/corrupted/degraded Latin, including Italian. The inflections have been largely abandoned in favor of word order, converting Latin from an SOV to an SVO.

Latin was distorted by the substrate of languages that existed prior to Roman invasion, hence the extremes of French and Romanian, which don’t sound related at all.

That said, there’s no such thing as a superior or inferior language. Some rhetorical flourishes may be easier to do in one language, and others might force the speaker to pay attention to different details or concepts, but humans make sure their languages do what they need them to do one way or the other.

English’s claim to fame is to have the most words in its dictionary, most of which are not in anyone’s active vocabulary. Being proud of one’s language is kind of silly, but it likely arises from the difficulty of navigating the nuances of an adopted language as compared to what you can do in your native tongue.

My Spanish is pretty good, but I can articulate myself better in English by at least an order of magnitude.

Well yeah, di. But can you speak the various patois of these many States? That’s an art form.

I’ll see your American patois and raise you Galician, Asturian, Aragonese, Leonese, Extremaduran, Falan (Spain); these variants of French (too numerous to list); these variants of Italian (also too numerous to list); Açoriano, Alentejano, Algarvio, Baixo-Berão, Berão, Estremenho, Madeirense, Alto-Minhoto, Nortenho, Trasmontanho (Portuguese), and heaven knows what they do in Romania.

Courtesy in those countries requires that you use the Standard dialect of Spanish, Italian, French, or Portuguese when speaking to foreigners, because the dialects are different enough to be difficult to understand.

Refried beans go good with rice and grated cheddar cheese is a soft taco. If you have chopped lettuce and tomato that can help too. If you still aren’t happy with that consider adding sour cream or guacamole or a mild to medium hot sauce like Valentina or Cholula (sort of the american equivalent of Valentina). If you want meat in that then add some ground beef or if feeling lazy then some chunk chicken from a can. You can also use refried beans as a half-ass bean dip if you have some corn chips. The problem is that a standard can of refried beans is three or four large servings so you might want to have some tupperware handy and make a largish taco a day for three days or so.

12 cans? Eeesh. I’m going to vote for food bank. A can of refried beans might last five to seven years of shelf life before bloating. For survival purposes you’d want it as freeze dried flakes in water proof packaging that is kept away from rats. You’d ad water and heat it just like dehydrated mashed potato flakes.

It has fat protein and salt in it. Collard Greens are okay for roughage and a little bit of vitamins. They will also probably last five years before they bloat. Most canned stuff will last around five years if kept around room temperature.

Being quasi-germanic and of late 19th century central Texas enclave farmer ancestry I’m supposed to love collard greens, mustard greens, turnip greens, spinach, and swish chard and see them as comfort food. But I don’t. I just eat them if someone else makes them. Although I like spinach in my chicken florentine and raw spinach is okay in some sandwiches or salads.

don’t defend the institution of marriage from any kind of traditionalist standpoint, because to do so would mark you as conservative, and conservatives need to learn to be conservative unconservatively; don’t run wacky candidates like, say, Michele Bachmann, because, you know, cuckoo!; and always accede to whatever the prevailing leftist narrative is on science

Man, I love the cliff you guys are driving off of. Please run on that little manifesto that Jeff laid out.

The bestest description I heard is, “The Republican’s are a Mad Men party in a Modern Family America.”

By all means, in 4 years run against Teh Gays, Teh Liberal Science, and stitch yourselves to Michele Bachman’s autism shots.

Oh, and please keep saying that 50% of Americans are just a bunch of takers ’cause that’s a sure fire way to get 51% of the vote.

No, what I’m saying is that after two generations of a public indoctrinated by leftist schools, media and entertainment, the only way we can defend capitalism is by playing rope a dope. The only way we can demonstrate that leftist Democratic policies will lead to failure is to let them fail. Of course, it’s taken the people of Detroit a while to learn that lesson.

They’ve learned, of course, nothing. Because the promise of a better tomorrow is always … just around the corner. Tomorrow, you see. Obamaphone. Foodstamps. They never get called on their bullshit of fail, because they hope for change, bla bla bla ..

The permanent class/caste system is already in place. Rich liberals insulated from the gritty side of reality, poor and working poor mollified by handouts and an unaccountable class of public employees raking it in.

Yep. this.

I really don’t know what the solution is. Half of Americans who care to vote want the Dems and there are 70 million Americans willing to do nothing to stand in the Dems’ way by taking the time to vote. Why not let them learn, good and hard, as Mencken put it, of the consequences of their actions.

Because I don’t know what it would take. Detroit, apparently, had record turnout, and the neighborhoods have NEVER been worse. Crime. Destruction. Home values. Slash and burn.

Seriously Slipperyslope, the president lost more votes than the GOP did in 4 years, and Romney ran as a moderate. The left isn’t really very popular either and your campaigns are composed mostly of hystrionic bullshit that targets the stupid and uninformed with irrational fear. Obamacare was unpopular. How it was passed was unpopular. The more the left DOES the harder a time it has staying in office which is why the GOP took (2010) and HELD (2012) the house and 33 governorships.

Obama held on. That’s a bummer. But he’s shrinking. And he’s losing a lot of people who voted for him in the past. Just not enough. He’s ultimately bad for the democrats. Celebrate away. I bet you celebrated in 2010 too until the election results came in. Backlash is a thing.

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